Born and raised between Minnesota and Tennessee, photographer Kerry Skarbakka from 2001 to 2014 created a project that looks like a basis for possible memes – try as he might – but in reality deals with profound issues, combining photographic research with the concept of performance.
“The Struggle to Right Oneself” is a series that aggressively impacts the viewer, thanks to a strange contrast of subjects, on the one hand a static landscape, strangely immobile and giving no idea of movement, on the other bodies of men falling, suspended in the air and ready to crash to the ground.

The contrasts and Kerry Skarbakka’s ability to capture such a precarious moment fill the photographs with electricity. The themes addressed in the shots and represented visually through the falls are those of instability, confusion, anxiety and loss of existential control. In fact, all themes explore an inner existential condition, which Skarbakka represents through the abandonment of bodies, dead weights abandoned to gravity, as if they were mannequins.
Each subject is deprived of strength and weight, a lightness that immediately becomes strange because in an immediate mechanism the observer is led to immediately think of the consequence of that lack of support.